Very ambitious project there, Dave!
Re: the use of animal bones . . .. Actually there is good precedent for using animal bones as fertilizer in the early agricultural history of the SE United States. By the 1830s the Southern coastal states were already experiencing soil depletion as a result of agricultural practices.
There was a very famous book "Calcareous Manures" published in the 1830s where in the author Edmund Ruffin advocates the use of marl to fertilize agricultural crops.
http://nationalregister.sc.gov...: see page 4. Marl was the content of old fossil beds that were mined for their calcium content and spread on fields.
The discovery of the Southern blackbelt soils in Alabama and Mississippi was one of the main reasons for planters to move west from the coastal states of Virginia, S. and N. Carolina, and eastern Georgia.
The coastal plain blackbelt soils are formed from the skeletons of old ocean fauna -- forming a calcium alkaline soil that did not need to resort to mining of fossil beds to maintain its fertility.
